Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

Peter Welinder is VP of Product & Partnerships at OpenAI, where he runs product and commercialization efforts of GPT-3, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and more. Boris Dayma is Machine Learning Engineer at Weights & Biases, and works on integrations and large model training. Peter, Boris, and Lukas dive into the world of GPT-3: - How people are applying GPT-3 to translation, copywriting, and other...

Ion Stoica is co-creator of the distributed computing frameworks Spark and Ray, and co-founder and Executive Chairman of Databricks and Anyscale. He is also a Professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Principal Investigator of RISELab, a five-year research lab that develops technology for low-latency, intelligent decisions. Ion and Lukas chat about the challenges of making a simple (but goo...

Stephan Fabel is Senior Director of Infrastructure Systems & Software at NVIDIA, where he works on Base Command, a software platform to coordinate access to NVIDIA's DGX SuperPOD infrastructure. Lukas and Stephan talk about why having a supercomputer is one thing but using it effectively is another, why a deeper understanding of hardware on the practitioner level is becoming more advantageous,...

Chris Padwick is Director of Computer Vision Machine Learning at Blue River Technology, a subsidiary of John Deere. Their core product, See & Spray, is a weeding robot that identifies crops and weeds in order to spray only the weeds with herbicide. Chris and Lukas dive into the challenges of bringing See & Spray to life, from the hard computer vision problem of classifying weeds from crops...

Kathryn Hume is Vice President Digital Investments Technology at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). At the time of recording, she was Interim Head of Borealis AI, RBC's research institute for machine learning. Kathryn and Lukas talk about ML applications in finance, from building a personal finance forecasting model to applying reinforcement learning to trade execution, and take a philosophical detou...

Sean McClain is the founder and CEO, and Gregory Hannum is the VP of AI Research at Absci, a biotech company that's using deep learning to expedite drug discovery and development. Lukas, Sean, and Greg talk about why Absci started investing so heavily in ML research (it all comes back to the data), what it'll take to build the GPT-3 of DNA, and where the future of pharma is headed. Sean and Greg a...

You might know him as the host of Gradient Dissent, but Lukas is also the CEO of Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML tools platform! In this special episode, the three W&B co-founders — Chris (CVP), Shawn (CTO), and Lukas (CEO) — sit down to tell the company's origin stories, reflect on the highs and lows, and give advice to engineers looking to start their own business. Chris reveals t...

Pete is the Technical Lead of the TensorFlow Micro team, which works on deep learning for mobile and embedded devices. Lukas and Pete talk about hacking a Raspberry Pi to run AlexNet, the power and size constraints of embedded devices, and techniques to reduce model size. Pete also explains real world applications of TensorFlow Lite Micro and shares what it's been like to work on TensorFlow from t...

Pieter is the Chief Scientist and Co-founder at Covariant, where his team is building universal AI for robotic manipulation. Pieter also hosts The Robot Brains Podcast, in which he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines, and rational robots. Lukas and Pieter explore the state of affairs of robotics in 2021, the challenges of achieving cons...

In this episode we're joined by Chris Albon, Director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation. Lukas and Chris talk about Wikimedia's approach to content moderation, what it's like to work in a place so transparent that even internal chats are public, how Wikimedia uses machine learning (spoiler: they do a lot of models to help editors), and why they're switching to Kubeflow and Docker. Ch...

In this episode, Emily and Lukas dive into the problems with bigger and bigger language models, the difference between form and meaning, the limits of benchmarks, and why it's important to name the languages we study. Show notes (links to papers and transcript): http://wandb.me/gd-emily-m-bender --- Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at and Faculty Director of the Master's Program in Co...

Jeff talks about building Facebook's early data team, founding Cloudera, and transitioning into biomedicine with Hammer Lab and Related Sciences. (Read more: http://wandb.me/gd-jeff-hammerbacher) --- Jeff Hammerbacher is a scientist, software developer, entrepreneur, and investor. Jeff's current work focuses on drug discovery at Related Sciences, a biotech venture creation firm that he co-founded...

Josh explains how astronomy and machine learning have informed each other, their current limitations, and where their intersection goes from here. ( Read more: http://wandb.me/gd-josh-bloom ) --- Josh is a Professor of Astronomy and Chair of the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the intersection of machine learning and physics, time-domain transients events, artif...

Xavier shares his experience deploying healthcare models, augmenting primary care with AI, the challenges of "ground truth" in medicine, and robustness in ML. --- Xavier Amatriain is co-founder and CTO of Curai, an ML-based primary care chat system. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at Quora, and Research/Engineering Director at Neflix, where he started and led the Algorithms team responsible f...

Spence shares his experience creating a product around human-in-the-loop machine translation, and explains how machine translation has evolved over the years. --- Spence Green is co-founder and CEO of Lilt, an AI-powered language translation platform. Lilt combines human translators and machine translation in order to produce high-quality translations more efficiently. --- 🌟 Show notes: - http://...

Roger and DJ share some of the history behind data science as we know it today, and reflect on their experiences working on California's COVID-19 response. --- Roger Magoulas is Senior Director of Data Strategy at Astronomer, where he works on data infrastructure, analytics, and community development. Previously, he was VP of Research at O'Reilly and co-chair of O'Reilly's Strata Data and AI Confe...

Amelia and Filip give insights into the recommender systems powering Pandora, from developing models to balancing effectiveness and efficiency in production. --- Amelia Nybakke is a Software Engineer at Pandora. Her team is responsible for the production system that serves models to listeners. Filip Korzeniowski is a Senior Scientist at Pandora working on recommender systems. Before that, he was a...

From Apache TVM to OctoML, Luis gives direct insight into the world of ML hardware optimization, and where systems optimization is heading. --- Luis Ceze is co-founder and CEO of OctoML, co-author of the Apache TVM Project, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the intersection of computer architecture, programming languages, mac...

Matthew explains how combining machine learning and computational biology can provide mainstream medicine with better diagnostics and insights. --- Matthew Davis is Head of AI at Invitae, the largest and fastest growing genetic testing company in the world. His research includes bioinformatics, computational biology, NLP, reinforcement learning, and information retrieval. Matthew was previously at...

Clem explains the virtuous cycles behind the creation and success of Hugging Face, and shares his thoughts on where NLP is heading. --- Clément Delangue is co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. Hugging Face started as an open source NLP library and has quickly grown into a commercial product used by over 5,000 companies. Connect with Clem: 📍 Twitter: https://tw...

Wojciech joins us to talk the principles behind OpenAI, the Fermi Paradox, and the future stages of developments in AGI. --- Wojciech Zaremba is a co-founder of OpenAI, a research company dedicated to discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence. He was also Head of Robotics, where his team developed general-purpose robots through new approaches to transfer learning, a...

Phil shares some of the approaches, like sparsity and low precision, behind the breakthrough performance of Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs). --- Phil Brown leads the Applications team at Graphcore, where they're building high-performance machine learning applications for their Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), new processors specifically designed for AI compute. Connect with P...

From working on COVID-19 vaccine rollout to writing a book on responsible ML, Alyssa shares her thoughts on meaningful projects and the importance of teamwork. --- Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger is as a Director of Product at Blue Shield of California, pursuing her dream of using technology to improve healthcare. She has over a decade of experience in building technical data-driven products and has hel...

Sean joins us to chat about ML models and tools at Lyft Rideshare Labs, Python vs R, time series forecasting with Prophet, and election forecasting. --- Sean Taylor is a Data Scientist at (and former Head of) Lyft Rideshare Labs, and specializes in methods for solving causal inference and business decision problems. Previously, he was a Research Scientist on Facebook's Core Data Science team. His...

Polly explains how microfluidics allow bioengineering researchers to create high throughput data, and shares her experiences with biology and machine learning. --- Polly Fordyce is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford. She is the Principal Investigator of The Fordyce Lab, which focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platf...